Let's write about "Doubt: A Parable" as an American theater classic

 Doubt (Broadway):  Recalling Meryl Streep’s “Half-Assed Genuflection”

Amy Ryan, as Sister Aloyslius, Zoe Kazan as Sister James and Liev Schreiber as Father Flynn

As a Roman Catholic, my opinion about the play "Doubt" is to consider it an American theater classic, because the story (based on an actual experience) describes the classic struggle women have encountered when speaking truth to power. This story is based on the life experience of the play's author, but I know if readers check the Archdiocese of Baltimore's website, they can find a report about a similar incident that occured at Saint Rita's Parish, in Dundalk Maryland.  

Sister Margaret McEntee inspired the play “Doubt,” by her former pupil John Patrick Shanley. Her fellow Sisters of Charity went to see the Broadway revival. Review by Michael Schulman published in The New Yorker.  

To her friends, Sister Margaret McEntee, of the Sisters of Charity of New York, is Sister Peggy. In 1956, when she was a twenty-one-year-old rookie teacher at St. Anthony School, in the Bronx, she was Sister James, a name that she shed in the late sixties, after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. 

Among her first graders was a shy kid named Johnny. “Every day, he’d raise his hand: ‘May I sharpen my pencil?’ ” she recalled recently. “The pencil sharpener was at the end of four windows, and he watched everybody going by. Finally, I said, ‘Johnny, you don’t have to sharpen your pencil. You just want to see what’s going on out there!’ ”

Decades later, in 2004, Sister Margaret found out that her former student, John Patrick Shanley*, had written a play called “Doubt,” in which a young nun named Sister James, who teaches in the Bronx, is torn between a charismatic priest, Father Flynn, and her rigid supervisor, Sister Aloysius, who suspects the priest of molesting a schoolboy. Sister Margaret attended a performance Off Broadway, and Shanley nervously watched her watch his rendering of her younger self. “It’s magnificent,” she told him. 

In fact, she saw the play again when it moved to Broadway, and met with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams when Shanley turned it into a film. “They would sit together with the habit on, and they’d be knitting,” Sister Margaret recalled of the two actors. “I said, ‘Oh, I knit,’ and I used to bring my baby booties over. The three of us, we had this little knitting circle.” Streep thanked her by name when she won the sag Award.

“Doubt” is now back on Broadway, in a Roundabout revival, and Sister Margaret, a cheery, chatty eighty-eight-year-old, had once again met with the cast, including Zoe Kazan, who plays Sister James. “They always pick a good-looking young actress to play me,” Sister Margaret boasted. She sat in a former novitiate, now an administrative building on the Riverdale campus of the University of Mount St. Vincent, which the Sisters of Charity founded as a women’s academy, in 1847. (About sixty Sisters live in the on-site convent, and the “Doubt” film was shot at the chapel.) 

Sister Margaret had seen the revival two nights earlier, but some thirty Sisters were about to catch the Saturday matinée. They boarded a chartered bus, wearing cardigans and trousers and blazers. “Doubt” is set in 1964, when the Sisters still wore black robes and bonnets, but the order abandoned the habit in the late sixties, post-Vatican II, to be more accessible to the community. 

Many of the nuns had short white hair and spoke in honking New York accents. Sister Donna Dodge, the order’s current president, had enjoyed the movie, but was critical of Streep’s “half-assed genuflection.”

In the sixties, there were more than a thousand Sisters in New York, but their number has dwindled to a hundred and forty, with a median age of eighty-five. 

After two decades in which no new members had joined, the Sisters voted to take a “path of completion,” meaning that they will let the order, which began in 1817, die out with them. 

“We prayed about it, and then we asked people to vote, and it was unanimous,” Sister Donna said. Laypeople will continue to run their ministries, including a housing program and a home for foster children. The Sisters, meanwhile, will put their affairs in order while they’re still spry enough—a task akin to drawing up a will. “Women have a lot more opportunities to serve in whatever way they want,” Sister Donna noted. “It’s just not an attractive life style, for some reason.”

They arrived at the theatre and filed through metal detectors. After the show, they convened in an upstairs lounge and snacked on pretzels. The play brought back memories of the old days. “The whole idea of ‘the priest is always right,’ ” one Sister said. “Sisters had a place and shouldn’t overstep their boundaries.” Another found the bows on the actors’ bonnets “a little droopy.” The cast emerged from the elevators, to cheers. Kazan, who had changed into a T-shirt and ripped jeans, hugged Sister Donna and said, “I’m so moved that you guys all came.” 

Someone asked her to sign a Playbill. The nuns had strong feelings about Sister Aloysius, played by Amy Ryan. “She was such a bitch!” one salty Sister told Kazan. “I felt very bad for you.”

They took a group photo; Liev Schreiber, who plays Father Flynn, towered above the Sisters. “Was your cap tight on your ear?” Sister Mary Sugrue, who joined in 1955, asked Kazan.

“It itches sometimes,” she confessed. They traded notes: Kazan used part of a milk jug to stiffen her bonnet; Sister Mary had used a Clorox bottle. “I keep thinking, Sister James is a nun even on her day off,” Kazan said. “She’s always got to wear this habit.”

“It took a while for that to change,” Sister Mary said. “Then they allowed us to wear white habits in the summertime, which was much better.” ♦

* John Patrick Shanley  Maine Writer post script:  Shanley created a theater classic about a deep rooted cultural epidemic in the Roman Catholic Church, a story that exposes the damage caused by inequities between women and men in the religious life.